Commander Graham Bethunes- 300-ft UFO Encounter 1951

Graham Bethune is a retired commander and pilot for the United States Navy. He has provided testimony about his encounter with a 300-ft UFO in 1951. The UFO was emitting a “monstrous circle of white light on water” that travelled 10,000 feet straight up in a fraction of a second.

The story of Cmdr. Graham Bethune is one of the most intriguing UFO encounters in history. It happened in 1951, when he was a young pilot stationed at Keflavik Air Base in Iceland. The base was used by NATO as a staging area for aircraft and crews headed to Europe during the Cold War.

Bethune was flying his Navy R5D Transport and was transferred to Air Transport Squadron One in 1950. He was sent to Keflavik, Iceland, with two other officers after a government meeting in Washington, D.C., during which Iceland’s encounters with unidentified flying objects were discussed.

At that time, he asked about UFO sightings in more detail and was told about circular objects with lighted undersides that resembled no craft known to have been tested at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland and Virginia where he worked.

Bethune asked the men if they were told anything by the U.S. government about the aircraft they had found. “Your government said they were experimental, probably experimental Russian bombers,” one man said. The flight was normally about ten hours—but this particular night, a wind of 16 knots blew against them.

At 1:00 a.m., Captain Bethune noticed something in the water below the horizon that looked like a city at night. He watched it for a while, but because he could see no definition, he called flight engineer Kinden’s attention to it.

Kinden looked but did not know what it was because there were no ships plotted in that area and the guard ship said that there was no Northern Light activity or bad weather reported in that region.

“I saw something below the horizon, on the water, that looked like approaching a city at night. It was just kind of ambient light, with no definition whatsoever. But it looked like we were approaching a large city at night. So I watched it for a while about 1:00 am,” said Graham Bethune.

“Finally I called Kindens attention to it, who was sitting in the right seat. He was route checking me. He took a look at it but didn’t know what it was. We couldn’t figure out, there is an ocean out there. We had passed over the guard ship already. The guard ship had told us the weather was clear and no Northern Light activity, and there were no ships plotted in that area,” Graham Bethune continued.

In addition to being an experienced pilot, Bethune, as all Navy pilots are trained navigators, knew how to navigate by the stars — making him uniquely qualified to judge what he saw that day.

The fact that Bethune was both an experienced pilot and graduated in 1943 from Pensacola Academy Air adds credibility to his story. His account is one of the most detailed and convincing UFO sightings on record.

“All Navy pilots are trained navigators, which is very important because we had to know all of the star systems. I navigated maybe 13 years around the planet with the stars. And when I first graduated from Pensacola in 1943 I went to the South Atlantic and we were hunting German submarines. This was all night flying. Everything we did was at night in patrol planes,” said Graham Bethune.

The pilots were on course and hundreds of miles from shore, according to control. They stood there for a bit, drifting to the right of it. At 10,000 feet, their heading was 222 degrees, and they were originally 40 miles away.

They could see definite lights and a pattern on the lake when they were approximately 25 or 30 miles away. So they couldn’t figure out what was going on with that pattern.

The base at Argentia was the target destination, so they sent the crew chief back to get Al Jones, the other plane commander.

31 passengers and two VIP crews were on board, each including a pilot. A VIP crew member made a report at that time that crew members of an aircraft also come forward.